by Robert Crais
"Samantha."
But she'd already hung up.
Dolan was standing at the mouth of the garage, watching the news vans. She wasn't smoking, but a crushed butt was by her toe. Guess I'd caught her between puffs. She also wasn't carrying the files.
She said, "They're going to go crazy with this."
"Yeah. How are you doing?"
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The cool eyes came to me. "You mean, has my ego survived your rejection, or am I grieving the loss of my self-esteem?"
"They don't come any tougher than you, do they?"
She turned back into the garage, and I followed her to the Beemer.
"Okay. Here's what I found out: Wozniak died so long ago that Rampart won't have his file anymore. They would've sent it down to the file morgue by Union Station."
"None of this is on computer?"
"This is the LAPD, World's Greatest. We got shit for computers."
I nodded.
"Internal Affairs has their own separate storage facility, with their own procedures for getting into their records. Forget it. But the file morgue is different. We've got a shot at that."
"Okay."
"I talked to a detective I know over at Rampart. He said it's pretty much the same story with DeVille. Since he died in prison, the Rampart sex crimes detectives who worked that case would've boxed the file and sent it to storage. We could order it from the district attorney's case file morgue, but we won't have to do that."
"You got a way to get at the files in storage?"
"I'm there almost every damned day with running the due diligence, but we can't just go in and sign the stuff out. You see?"
"So what do we do?"
"Steal it. You up for that?"
"Yes."
"Glad you're up for something."
The Los Angeles Police Department storage facility is an ancient, red brick building in an industrial area just south of the railroad yard. The bricks looked powdery, and I thought that there was probably no way the building could pass an earthquake inspection if it wasn't owned by the LAPD. It was
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the kind of place that, while you're in it, you're spending most of your time hoping we don't get a big temblor.
Dolan parked the Beemer well away from the other cars that were there, then led me through a plain gray door and along a short hall.
I said, "Hot."
"The frigging air must be out again. Listen, do us both a favor and don't say anything. I'll do all the talking."
I didn't answer her.
"Well?"
"You said not to say anything."
"Try not to act smart. You don't pull it off."
An overweight civilian clerk named Sid Rogin was reading a magazine behind a low counter. He was in his sixties and balding, with thin, wispy hair, and a glass eye. He brightened when he saw Dolan and put down the magazine. He was also sweating, and had a little fan going. The fan was pathetic. He would've gotten more air from a chihuahua wagging its tail.
"Hey, Sammy, what it is? They still got you running down due diligence?"The middle-class white man does black.
Dolan gave him a sparkling grin. I would've guessed that if anyone called her Sammy she would gun them down on the spot. "Yeah, same old same old. We've got to run down a deceased officer and a perp he was working named Leonard DeVille, also deceased."
Rogin turned a sign-in log toward her. "Names and badge numbers. What kind of time frame we talking here on the perp?"
She picked up his pen and glanced at me. "I've got it. No sweat." She told Rogin when DeVille had died.
"You taking out the files?"
"Not if we're lucky. Just gotta look up some dates." She flashed the bright smile again. "Figure my partner here could look up the officer while I get the perp, save everybody some time."
"Okay. Step around behind."
Dolan and I followed Rogin into a series of rooms lined with industrial shelving stacked with dusty cardboard boxes.
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"What's the officer's name?"
"Stuart Vincent." She spelled Vincent.
"Good enough. Officers on this floor. You and I will have to go up to the second for the perps."
"Noproblemo."
We followed Rogin along the aisles, me thinking that all the crummy cardboard boxes looked like little crypts.
We turned a corner into a section of aisle marked T—Z. Rogin said, "Here ya go, V as in Vincent." Six boxes were marked with Fs. He pulled down the one that would hold Vi. "All you wanna do is look through the file?"
Dolan glanced at me, and nodded.
I said, "That's right."
Rogin had the lid off, pulling out a thick file that had been tied with a string. He frowned. "It's awful thick, Sammy. You gotta read through the whole thing?"
"You look busy, Sid. Sorry to put you out this way."
"Well, it's not that. They just don't like people back here."
Dolan raised her eyebrows back at him and stiffened. "Well, Sidney, I guess if you'd rather I go back to Parker and have them call down." She let it drop, watching him.
"Oh, no, hell, you don't have to do that. It's just I gotta get back up and watch the front."
I said, "I'll be done by the time you guys get back from the second floor. No sweat."
"You sure?"
"Absolutely."
Dolan clapped Sid on the shoulder and grinned at him some more. "Let's do it, Sid. Get outta this goddamned heat."
I pretended to be interested in Vincent's file until their steps were gone, then I searched down the aisle for the Ws. Twelve boxes were marked with a W, the eighth and ninth file boxes holding Wo.
We could have asked for Wozniak's file and signed for it, but we didn't want a written record connecting Dolan to what we were doing. She was in enough trouble, and if things went wrong I didn 't want her in more.
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I pulled Wozniak's file, then pushed the boxes back in their rows.
Wozniak's personnel file was too thick to shove down my pants, but most of it didn't concern me. I pulled the sheet listing his partners prior to Pike and their badge numbers, then flipped back to the beginning of his career and pulled the sheet noting his training officers. Wozniak was a top cop: He'd been awarded the Medal of Valor twice, twelve certificates of commendation, and a half dozen public service commendations for working with schools and troubled youth. The list of his arrests went on for pages, listing the arrestee, date of arrest, and charge. I jerked those pages, folded them, and put them in my jacket. The next section in the file was devoted to disciplinary actions. I wasn't even thinking to look at it except that Abel Wozniak had been called to appear before the Internal Affairs Group on two occasions six weeks prior to his death. The requesting Internal Affairs officer being one Detective Harvey Krantz.
I said, "Damn."
No other information was given except the notation that the inquiry was terminated, along with the date of termination.
Krantz.
I jerked that page, too, and put it with the others.
Dolan's voice came along the aisle, Dolan saying, "Hey, buddy, I hope you're ready to go. We're outta here."
I stuffed the remains of the file together and pushed it between the boxes, then hurried back to the Fs. I picked up Vincent's file just as Dolan and Rogin came around the corner.
She said, "You find what you need?"
"Yeah. You?"
She shook her head. Slow.
"DeVille's file isn't here."
I raised my eyebrows. "Where is it?"
Rogin waved his hand. "Some other dick probably checked it out. You want me to look it up?"
I said, "If you don't mind. Maybe I can call the guy and get what we need."
We followed him back to the counter and waited while he
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fingered through a box of little index cards.
He scratched his head, checked some numbers he'd written on a little pad, then frowned. "Hell, it ain't here. If it was signed out, I woulda had the log-out card in here, but it ain't."
"Any way to tell how long it's been gone?"
"Not without the card. Ain't this the shits?"
Dolan glanced at me again, then pulled at my arm.
"Maybe you just misfiled it, Sid. It's no big deal."
When we were on our way out to her car, she said, "I don't believe in coincidences."
"You thinking someone ripped off that file?"
"I'm thinking I don't believe in coincidences. But we can still get a copy. The district attorney's office keeps a record of all their case files in their own storage facility. I can order up theirs."
"How long will that take?"
"A couple of days. Don't be peevish, World's Greatest. What'dyouget?"
"I got some names, and his collar jacket, but something else, too." I told her about the disciplinary notation showing Wozniak had been the subject of an investigation, and that Krantz was the investigating officer.
Dolan made a hissing sound. "That's IAG, man. You can't just ask Krantz."
We got into her car. The leather was so hot it burned through my pants. Dolan lifted her butt off the seat.
"I never should've got black."
She started the engine and turned on the air conditioner, but didn't put the car in gear.
I took out the pages and looked at them again. I skimmed over the arrest pages, but ended up back with the disciplinary sheet and the two meetings with Krantz. The dates were there. "If I can't get the files, and I can't ask Krantz, maybe there's someone else I can ask."
She held out her hand for the sheet. "This doesn't say shit."
"No. It doesn't."
"It doesn't say if he was the subject, or if they wanted to question him about someone else."
"Nope."
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She handed the sheet back, thinking, then took out her cell phone and punched a number.
"Hang on."
She made three phone calls and spoke for almost twenty minutes, twice writing in a notepad. "This guy might be able to help you. He was an IA supervisor when Krantz was there."
"Who is he?"
She handed me the sheet. "Mike McConnell. He's retired now, living out in Sierra Madre. That's his number. He owns a sod farm."
"Sod."
"He grows grass."
"I know what it means."
"I wasn't sure. Sometimes you're stupid."
She floored the gas, spun her tires, and brought me back to my car.
28
Sierra Madre is a relaxed community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains to the east of Los Angeles. Mature green trees line the streets and kids still ride bikes without worrying about getting shot in a drive-by. The town has a peaceful, rural feel that Los Angeles lost when the developers took over city hall. It is also where Don Siegel filmed the exterior locations of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I haven't yet seen a pod person there, though I keep looking. Farther west, L.A. is filled with them.
Mike McConnell's sod farm was on a broad flat plain near the Eaton Canyon Reservoir. The reservoir has been dry
f
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for years, and the property beneath it has been leased to farmers and nurseries who've put it to good use. Model airplane builders come fly their tiny machines out of the unused land, which is scrubby and dead, but the irrigated parcels are brightly alive with acre after acre of flowers and yearling plants, and sod.
I turned off the paved street and followed a gravel road between flat green fields of buffalo grass, Bahia grass, St. Augustine and Bermuda grasses, and others I didn't recognize. Rainbirds dotted the fields like Erector Set scarecrows, spraying water, and the air smelled of fertilizer. I was hoping to find a field of pulsating pods, but instead I came to a service area where a trailer and a large metal shed sat surrounded by spindly eucalyptus trees. Live in hope.
Three Hispanic guys were sitting in the bed of a Ford pickup, eating sandwiches and laughing. They were soiled from working in the sod fields, and burned deep umber by the sun. They smiled politely as I pulled up and got out of my car. A thin brown dog was lying beneath the pickup's gate. He looked at me, too.
I said, "Senor McConnell?"
The youngest guy nodded toward the trailer. A late-model Cadillac Eldorado was parked next to it between the trees. "He's inside. You want me to get him for you?"
"That's okay. Thanks."
McConnell came out as I was crunching across the gravel. He was in his sixties, with a large gut hanging over khaki trousers and Banner work boots. An unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt let the gut show like he was proud of it. He held a Negro Modelo beer in the dark bottle, but he offered his free hand. "Mike McConnell. You Mr. Cole?"
"Yes, sir. Please, call me Elvis."
He laughed. "Bon't know as I could do that with a straight face."
What do you say to something like that?
"I'd invite you in, but it's hotter in there than out here. You want a beer? All I got is this Mexican shit. Fresh out of American."
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"No, sir. But thanks."
A slim Chicana who couldn't have been more than twenty appeared in the trailer's door and frowned out at him. Somebody had sprayed a thin cotton print dress over her body, and she was barefoot. Hot in there, all right.
She said, "No me hagas esperar. No megusta estar sola."
McConnell looked scandalized. "Quidado con lo que dices o te regreso a Sonom."
She stuck out her tongue and pouted back into the trailer. The guys on the truck nudged each other.
McConnell shrugged apologetically. "She's young."
He led me to a redwood table set in the shade between the eucalyptus trees, and had some of the Modelo. A USMC globe and anchor was so faded on his right forearm that it looked like an ink smudge. "Got two thousand square yards of St. Augustine goin' out this evening to a Chinaman in San Marino. If you're looking for St. Augustine I might not be able to help you, but I got twelve other kinds of sod. What are you thinking about?"
I gave him one of my cards. "I'm afraid I wasn't being straight with you, Mr. McConnell. I apologize about that, but I need to ask you about an IA investigation that happened on your watch. I'm hoping you'll talk to me about it."
He read over the card, then put it on the table. He reached around behind him like he was going for a handkerchief, but came out with a little black .380 automatic. He didn't aim it at me, he just held it.
The men on the truck stopped eating.
"Lying's a poor way to start, son. You carrying?"
I tried not to look at the gun. "Yes, sir. Under my left arm."
"Take it out with your left hand. Two fingers only. I see more than two fingers on metal, I'll pop you."
I did what he said. Two fingers.
"You keep holding it like that, away from your body like it smells bad. Walk on back over there and drop it in your car, then come on back."
The hired hands were poised on the bed like swimmers on their starting platforms, ready to dive if the shooting started.
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Imagine: Coming north all the way from Zacatecas to get shot in a sod field.
I dropped the gun into the front seat, then walked back to the table.
"I didn't come here to make trouble for you, Mr. Mc-Connell. I just need a few answers. It's been my experience that if I warn people I'm coming, they have a tendency to be gone when I get there. I couldn't afford that you'd be gone."
McConnell nodded.
"You always carry that little gun out here?"
"I spent thirty years on the job, twenty-five in Internal Affairs. I prosecuted cops who were every bit as rotten as any thug on the street, and I made enemies doing it. More than one of'm has tried looking me up."
I guess I'd carry the gun, too.
